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Introducing my WebLog

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hi my name is Ali Alvi. I am a developer for Internet Explorer. I have been working at Microsoft almost for the past 4 years now with (in my opinion) the greatest browser team on the planet.

I did my BS in computer science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). I worked for a while with ABN AMRO Bank's Global IT department, mostly working with Banking applications and their deployment. I then got a chance to interview with Microsoft. And since then i've been here with the IE team, albeit in different roles over the years.

The things that i am passionate about in my job is the tremendous challenge of working on the single most widely used application in the world. The application that truly takes more CPU time on any computer than anything else that has ever been created. The immense impact in ppl's everyday lives of what we do here is mind boggling. But with that great impact comes responsibility of making sure that the world is secure and free of any malware. Ppl have lately become very skeptical about web security. One of the biggest challenges that the browser development community faces is to get back ppl's confidence in connecting to the internet and thinking of it as a safe place. This blog is just another attempt to get everyone to talk about what hurts them the most and what they love about browsing by using IE and how they feel their lives could be made a lot easier by making small/big changes in the way IE works.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    Couple of quick questions?

    1) What do you think of firefox?

    2) What is stopping the IE team from adding tabs on their browser?
  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    Make IE better than FireFox both in function and standard compliance.

    Make IE better than FireFox both in function and standard compliance.

    Make IE better than FireFox both in function and standard compliance.

    Make IE better than FireFox ...
  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    IE needs to have better support for web standards. :)
  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    "...greatest browser team on planet.."

    sounds like a flamebait to me... :)
  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    I was counting seconds before someone brought up firefox on this blog :) and I wasn't disappointed. I have played with firefox on my home machine and what it brings more than anything else an option for people to use and see for themselves what avenues are available in the browsing domain.

    As for functionality with firefox, I feel they have a long way to go before they can be successfully deployed in a Corporate environment. However, they do have good innovations in terms of tabbed browsing and history maintenance.

    As for the standard compliance, one cannot say for sure how spec compliant firefox really is, not until we have a wide customer base using it. I do believe that IE has better compatibility with applications and servers when it comes HTML. One of the benefits of being a new browser is that you don't have to worry about application compatibility and you can easily dismiss spec non-compliant applications. IE, unfortunately cannot simply dismiss everything that isn't fully spec compliant due to its HUGE consumer base and dependencies. However, whenever there's an issue of IE misbehaving wrt http or other standards specifications, effort is made to ensure compliance, even though it might be conditional compliance (as defined by the RFC).
  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    "sounds like a flamebait to me... :) "

    I stand corrected. I will update my statement to say .. "In my opinion, the greatest browser team in the world"

    Greatness is a relative thing anyway.
  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2005
    with Windows XPSP2 .. you have the ability to do just what you are talking about. If you go to Tools->manage AddOns .. it will show you all the BHOs running inside your browser process and it also gives you the ability to disable any objects that you haven't consciously intended to run. Also with the Active Content blocking via the information Bar stops a lot of these ActiveX controls from installing silently on your machine and with the comfort of the NON-MODAL information bar, you don't have to click any dialogs to continue browsing.
  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2005
    Security is all good but it should be assumed and not necessarily a customer requirment!

    I do want tabbed browsing...

    Ali